We could have done with Orwell this week. He would have had a field day on Cameron's speech to the party conference. Just consider the contradictions.
Cameron promised an all out war on poverty. The first move of his new government was to cut tax credits and make single mothers working for low wages massively worse off. His next step will be to impose a further £18 billion of cuts on public services which are, of course, more heavily used by the poor than the rich.
He spoke of the importance of social mobility and of the place good schools play in achieving this. Then he announced he was creating more free schools which direct more resources to middle class neighbourhoods and leave growing inner cities desperately short of school places and suffering from overcrowding.
He spoke of his determination to tackle generation rent and to help them to get a home of their own. His first move has been to force Housing Associations and councils to sell off more of their homes thus cutting available affordable homes and heavily discouraging them from building any more. He has now decided to encourage housing developers to build more. By getting rid of all effective planning controls and letting them build what they want where they want to. As they destroy the last of our green belt we can comfort ourselves with the illusion that these developers are bound to be building one bedroom flats for sofa surfers. Nothing could possibly incline them to build nicely profitable four bedroom houses at impossibly high costs whilst they pass off expensive one bedroom retirement homes as their contribution to affordable housing.
He passionately launched an attack on all those who were defenders of terrorism and who opposed British values. No mention was made of his latest meeting with Saudi Arabia which has been the prime source of funding for ISIS and for fundamentalism across the globe. Nor was there an attack on them for flogging and jailing bloggers or crucifying teenagers.
He claimed he had put climate change at the centre of his parties vision. Just after he had removed all meaningful subsidies from wind and solar and provided huge subsidies for coal, gas and especially nuclear. The "greenest government ever" has proved to be the first one in my lifetime to subsidise fossil fuels more than green energy and to insist that wind farms must have local approval whereas fracking should go ahead whatever the local planners want.
He promised us to defend our nation and its values. Over the past five years he has relentlessly cut back on the numbers of conventional armed forces. We have had the spectacle of soldiers who have performed heroics coming back from action in Afghanistan to find themselves redundant. I am sure that the remaining troops will be relieved to know that their fight against the Taliban will be made easier by telling them we possess a Trident missile but not enough troops, helicopters or planes on aircraft carriers.
He spoke of his firm belief in the importance of sound money. His government encouraged the Bank of England to print hundreds of billions of pounds of money in the run up to the election and to spend it on taking dodgy assets off the books of investment banks so that they could get back to making profits and fixing LIBOR.
Then he turned his attention to the importance of addressing Britain's Social Problems. His caring side. We need, he told us, to tackle the root cause of poverty. Sounds great. The only problem is that he thinks the root cause is that some of the poor receive welfare. His way of sorting out their problems is to cut the welfare state to cure them of this bad habit. He just caringly chose not to use his conference speech to let us know where.
Almost certain to be included will be another round of cuts to money for care workers because he thinks that if you truly care that is what you should do. If you are elderly and vulnerable he will caringly ensure that you don't have to worry about receiving an insultingly short 15 minutes visit designed to put a tick in a box to confirm that you are alive. Instead you will caringly not get a visit at all. Those rare high risk people who do still qualify for a visit will caringly get it from a lowly paid and demoralised social worker working for a local authority that has been re-organised and cut more times than she has delivered hot dinners. Should the council providing this service be found by an inspector to be below standard this will caringly not be cured by providing enough funds to do the job properly. Instead the service will be taken over by a more efficient provider. Perhaps a foreign hedge fund. One of the ones that collected huge bonuses for efficiently driving the world to the brink of bankruptcy whilst the care worker was struggling to do her job on near minimum wage and with negligible resources. If you find that statement a touch over the top I should say that I already know one social worker who works for a company owned by a foreign hedge fund. This sort of thing is already happening and what Cameron is really saying is the core problem is that it is not happening often enough for his liking.
So this is what we are faced with for the next 5 years. One of the crudest and more virulent attacks on the welfare state you can imagine. Accompanied of course by some of the boldest statements about this hurting Mr. Cameron more than it hurts them. The way to help the poor is, he thinks, to get rid of as much of the welfare system as he can so that they learn the value of hard work. Clearly that single Mum doing her early morning cleaning job before getting the kids off to school and starting her second job doesn't understand that the cut in her tax credits has been carefully designed to make sure she learns the value of hard work.
That is what we should really learn from Cameron's conference speech. When he starts talking about the vital importance of welfare and about looking after the poor and needy then he is about to launch the biggest attack on the welfare state you have ever seen. Come back Orwell. We need you!